It is crucial to set your camera properly if you want to take the highest quality landscape photos. However, with the large range of menu options and settings found in cameras today, it isn’t easy to find the optimal setup. This article covers the best camera settings to use for landscape photography, including many options that are “set it and forget it” parts of the menu that you rarely will need to adjust. Keep in mind that all of these…

Whether you are exclusively a landscape photographer or simply someone who likes to capture awesome shots of just about anything, landscape photography can be an excellent way to hone your ability to put together a composition. Lots of subjects that result in excellent shots require a photographer to react quickly in order to capture a moment that will be gone in mere seconds. A landscape, on the other hand, comes with a stillness that allows that same photographer to stop,…

With all the amazing new cameras and lenses creating outstanding color, most of us are flooded with saturated images all over social media. But, a few decades back, most of what we saw were gray worlds. Even though current day photography can bring out millions of colors to life, the gray world is calm, peaceful and fascinating on its own. In this article, we shall see how to make interesting monochrome images and bring them to life, in a nutshell.

Capturing a stunning shot of the northern lights (or southern lights) dancing across the sky surely must be on the bucket list of many photographers out there. On a recent trip into the Arctic Circle, I was lucky enough to see the aurora borealis on several nights. What follows are some tips and recommendations on how to photograph the northern lights and come back with some stunning pictures.

Focusing is one of the pillars of photography. If you don’t focus in the right place, at best, your photos won’t be as sharp as possible – and, at worst, they could be completely unusable. There’s a lot that goes into focusing correctly, even in a genre like landscape photography, where your subject tends to stay relatively still. To get the best results, you’ll want to optimize your techniques as much as possible, and that’s what this article covers. So,…

There’s a reason why landscape photographers like waking up at 4AM and hiking out to the middle of nowhere. (Or, at the very least, there’s a reason why we tolerate it.) Are you a morning person? I’m not. But – countless times – I’ve stood by my tripod as the sun rises, watching the morning light illuminate a beautiful landscape. And that’s the reason. It’s all about the light. If you can get this one right, your photos will be…

What do you do if you spend weeks planning a photography adventure, and then when the time to experience that adventure arrives, something comes up that spoils all your preparation? Maybe its the weather, maybe its a park closure, or maybe the fall colour was two weeks late. Experiences like these can happen to anyone. And unfortunately, I have seen too many photographers throw up their hands, stow their camera, and abandon all that they had planned just because things…

The way I see it, sand dunes are among the most wonderful places in the world. They’re the very definition of a windswept landscape — the product of our planet’s most fundamental forces. They also exist everywhere, from coastal regions to deserts that span entire continents. Below, I’ll offer some of my top tips for photographing sand dunes and getting incredible images.

Our team at Photography Life would like to begin by wishing Happy Holidays to our readers all around the world! Thank you for all your support, and we are excited to say that we have a huge announcement today, which many people have been asking us about for months. With festivities in the air, we are happy to announce that our first “Level 3” video tutorial — the Landscape Photography Course — is now available! If the end of the year is…

It’s something we all care about, right? Sharpness. As a landscape photographer, with very few exceptions, taking sharp photos will be an important part of your work. That’s why you’ve spent so much time learning about the technical side of photography — and so much money buying high-quality camera equipment. This article covers everything that matters if you want your landscape photos to have as much sharpness and detail as possible, including the 15 most important tips to keep in…

If you’re first starting out in landscape photography, you probably have a lot of questions. It isn’t always an intuitive field, and not everyone finds a connection to it. That said, landscape photography is such a rewarding pursuit that many photographers want to learn more tips and techniques to practice it as well as possible. In this article, I’ll share some of my top landscape photography tips for beginners, including some suggestions that might fly in the face of what…

Photography Life is excited to announce the creation of a new landscape photography section on the website! For years, one of the most important parts of Photography Life has been landscape photography, including dozens of guides, tutorials, and inspirational essays we’ve written along the way. And, as our website continues to grow, we wanted to make it easy for readers to find these articles as quickly as possible. In the upcoming weeks and months, keep an eye out for several…

How is it that two photographers can visit the same landscape at the same time, but one of them manages to take a better photo? It’s not about equipment, or camera settings, or sharpness. Instead, it’s all about composition. Composition is how you arrange the elements of your photograph to guide a viewer’s eye. How do you pick a good composition for your landscape photos? There are two elements that matter more than anything else: simplicity and visual weight. In…

One of the windiest nights I’ve ever taken pictures turned into perhaps the single most rewarding — and frightening — landscape photography experience of my life. I was on the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley, a place I had visited twice in the past, though under much tamer conditions. This night, the gusts of wind were far greater than I had seen before, and they kicked up a layer of sand that made for amazing sunset photos. But as…

When you’re out taking nighttime landscape photos — Milky Way photography, or photos of the Aurora Borealis — one of the most difficult tasks is to compose your photos exactly how you want. The reason? It’s simply too dark to see anything. Looking through the viewfinder on a DSLR, it can be tough to make out any of the scene’s important features. Live view might be even worse, often showing absolutely no detail at all. The most common solution is to…

We’ve all been there. You’re standing in front of an amazing landscape with the camera in your hands ready to take beautiful pictures but there’s one problem: there are hundreds of people surrounding you and obscuring the scene, making it difficult to capture a good-looking image.

It might seem like one of the simplest parts of photography: leveling your horizon. Most photographers want their horizons to be straight, of course, but this isn’t an area of photography that gets too much attention. And why would it? Leveling the horizon is a very easy task — right? In practice, though, it requires more care than many people think. You can’t just rely on your camera’s “virtual horizon,” or your post-processing software’s “auto straighten” tool. Our perception of…

There are no times of day more famous for photography than “Golden Hour” — sunrise and sunset. Although great light can happen at any time, the edges of the day are perhaps the most consistent sources of inspiration you can find. Still, just because they’re beautiful doesn’t mean they’re easy to photograph. In this article, I’ll cover some suggestions for capturing sunrise and sunset as well as possible, including tips for exposure, creativity, and post-processing.

One of the most misunderstood parts about landscape photography is the correct way to fit your entire scene within a photo’s depth of field. Where do you focus? What aperture should you use? You might think that these questions are easy to answer with a hyperfocal distance chart, where you provide your focal length and aperture, and the chart tells you exactly where to focus. There’s only one hiccup — if you want the sharpest possible results, these charts are…

In this article, I will try to give you a few tips on how to photograph the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland. Moreover, I will also add a few pieces of advice on how to plan a trip to Zermatt. Matterhorn, located in south Switzerland on the border with Italy, is one of the most famous European Alps peaks. It towers to 4,478 meters above the sea level and is marked by its sharp pyramid shape. Its pronounced shape has always…